Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  As November turned, and the drudgery of thin wintering life set in, Mackenzie and Pond huddled around a small table in their wooden shack in the blizzard north, and the old man shared his secrets. He told Mackenzie where he had gone the year he left the north country, the only year he had left the land.

  In the fall of 1784, Pond had gone to New York City. He had a map to present to the U.S. Congress. He showed it to Mackenzie as well, a broad sheet crisscrossed with every river and lake of the upper continent, every post labeled, the lands of the Chipewyan and Esquimaux. Even a grand river flowing to a sea he called the Mer du Nord West.

  That river. It was the key, the focus of his life’s work, the culmination of years of exploration. Pond told Mackenzie he had found the long-sought water route to the Pacific. That the next year, he would paddle the length of the river, cross Kamchatka, trade with Canton, and then push to Moscow. That he had drawn a map of the whole territory, to present to Catherine the Great herself.

  That he, Peter Pond of Connecticut, was the man who had finally solved the riddle of the Northwest Passage.

  — 11 —

  TO THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE, 1788

  In 1775, after nearly three hundred years of European nautical failure, the British Parliament authorized the award of twenty thousand pounds to whoever could discover the Northwest Passage. Such prizes had already proven successful; a similar challenge to solve the problem of measuring longitude had induced John Harrison to develop a series of chronometers between 1730 and 1773.

  Captain James Cook, hero of the Admiralty, accepted the challenge, setting sail on his third great voyage in 1776. His first two journeys, to the South Pacific in 1768 and 1772, had given him a reputation for “negative discoveries,” proving speculative geographers wrong. In further pursuit of the balanced-earth theory, he had searched for land below Australia and never found it. “If I have failed in discovering a Continent it is because it does not exist…and not for want of looking,” Cook said. If Cook couldn’t find a northwest passage, the thinking went, then it wasn’t there to find.

  Cook’s plan was to turn the search on its head and scout the west coast of North America for the passage’s outlet; perhaps it would be easier to start from the end and work back toward the beginning. On his way north along the California coast, Cook was beset by fog and rain. Storms pushed him out to sea for a time. Eventually, he sheltered his ship among mountain peaks that fell into the ocean, and local Indian tribes sought to trade him beaver, seal, and otter furs.

  In the late spring of 1778, Captain Cook surveyed a vast inlet at 60 degrees latitude, because it might lead to “a very extensive inland communication.” The water grew fresher as they worked in, and the mouth of the river was choked with timber, huge trees that had floated down from the snowy mountains. Tide and current pushed against them, and they were blocked from continuing any farther. “A fine spacious river, but a cursed unfortunate one to us,” he wrote, frustrated. The inlet would be named for Cook.

  By late summer, Cook and his crew had sailed up through the Bering Strait that separated Alaska from Asia. But here, above 70 degrees latitude, he encountered ten-foot-tall pack ice. Sailors of the day generally did not believe such ice could form in open salt water, that only fresh or shallow water could freeze near shore, and so the hulls of Cook’s ships were not reinforced to brave such obstacles. What he saw unnerved him, and Cook retreated.

  The lord of the negative discovery had done it again: there was no ice-free northwest passage, no navigable sea of the Arctic. Cook thought he was on a fool’s errand and wrote a letter to the Admiralty that he entrusted with Russian sailors off Kamchatka. “I must confess I have little hopes of succeeding,” he reported. There were no routes through the continent, and “the Polar part is far from being an open Sea.” The whole affair was “disappointing.”

  In time, the letter would arrive in London. Cook did not. He was dead only a few months later, beaten to death on a Hawaiian beach and then, in a ritual reserved for royalty, cooked and deboned by the island’s holy men.

  Legend of Cook’s travels spread, but not the gloomy qualifiers or his sense of failure. In 1783, John Ledyard, one of Cook’s crew, published his Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage. Where Cook was reticent about a northwest passage in his personal writing, Ledyard was exuberant in his own volume, especially praising the potential fur-trading opportunities. The book was the talk of New York in 1784, when Peter Pond was showing off a map of potential river routes across the continent. It was missing only one key feature: an outlet on the Pacific. Pond found it in the reports of Cook’s voyage.

  * * *

  ————

  Awgeenah delivered to Peter Pond more than furs. The English Chief also brought news, accounts of the land, cartographic insights from his travels to trade with the Red Knife tribes. For Pond, these tidbits of geography were even more valuable than the beaver pelts. He added each detail to a map that he meticulously drew and redrew and redrew over the long winters. Every new version revealed more of his scheme.

  And Awgeenah’s most important detail, first reported on Matonabbee’s deerskin map, was this: an enormous river, fed by Slave Lake, that drove relentlessly west.

  During their winter together in 1787, Pond told Mackenzie of his travels three years before. He was searching for sponsorship and funding to mount an expedition and prove an interior northwest passage. His map showed a northern end to the Rocky Mountains and a chain of lakes and rivers stretching to the Mer du Nord West—not the Arctic Sea of the pole, not the Pacific Ocean, but rather the sea of the Northwest Passage. To boast its accuracy, Pond wrote that his chart was based upon interviews with forty Red Knife Indians.

  Pond first took his map to New York, the capital of the United States, to petition the Congress. But newly organized under the Articles of Confederation, few members were present, and the map he showed about aroused little interest.

  So Pond returned to Montreal to make the circuit of coffeehouses, business concerns, and government officials. He discovered that Cook’s journey and a new map of his travels were hotly discussed among gentlemen of standing. Pond revised his chart to reflect Cook’s survey, adding the coastal features of the Pacific, and secured a meeting with the British lieutenant governor of Quebec, Henry Hamilton. The two men had last seen each other in Detroit, when Pond was a new fur trader, and Hamilton was the “Hair-Buyer General” of the fort. In the decade since, their paths had diverged, Hamilton to urban wealth and privilege, Pond to wicked toil in the northern backcountry.

  In the stately Château Ramezay, decorated by a wall-sized tapestry of peacocks and pagodas of the Orient, Pond talked of his map and his plan to access the trade with China. Alaska was all sketched out, his wintering quarters in Athabasca temptingly close, an easy three-day journey to Jesuits Harbor on the Pacific, he claimed. Pond was not the only trader petitioning the British government. Threatened by the New Concern, the North West Company—with which Pond was not affiliated at the time, having turned down the single share offered in the partnership that year—was also officially lobbying for a trade monopoly in the lands it explored at its own expense, “between the latitudes of 55 and 65, all that tract of country extending west of the Hudson’s Bay to the North Pacific Ocean.” The Russians were already trading in sea otter pelts on the coast. The Americans would wake up and realize the opportunity at any time. They needed to go now, to the Pacific, while they still could.

  Legally, much of this land was claimed by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The royal monopoly of Prince Rupert’s Land extended to a space ten times the size of the Holy Roman Empire, the largest piece of property ever owned by a private company. But these borders had never been surveyed, delineated, or even superficially explored and established by the HBC. Its men only ventured into a tiny percentage of that land, sleeping the winter away on the bay with such disdain that in 1749 the British Parliament chastised them for their laziness and failure to properly search for a northwest passag
e. If such a waterway was to be found, Pond felt, other men of industry and imagination would have to take up that cause.

  Pond was relentless in pressing his case. Hamilton was convinced and wrote back to London that Pond had “a passion for making discoveries” and should be supported. But the Crown disagreed. Alexander Dalrymple, the hydrographer for the East India Company and consultant to the British Admiralty, said that the Hudson’s Bay Company should be engaged in the Northwest Passage expedition instead, as the Montreal traders “seem to be scarcely less savage than the most savage of the Indians.”

  That letter took many months to cross the Atlantic, though, and Pond had not waited for a reply. He returned to Athabasca in the summer of 1785, to plan the expedition himself. He had heard all he needed in Montreal.

  Back at the Old Establishment, Pond considered what Awgeenah had told him of a river flowing west from Slave Lake. He studied the map of Cook’s travels. He had discussed the geography with the most learned minds of New York, New England, and Montreal. The solution to the problem of the Northwest Passage lay in Cook’s Inlet. He was sure of it.

  Cook was surveying this vast river mouth in 1778, just as Peter Pond had crossed the Methye Portage for the first time. Cook reported large amounts of timber in the water, which matched the wood-blown Slave, brought down from the mountains. Cook also noted that the water of the inlet was merely brackish, almost fresh, so a great river must flow into it. In 1787, Pond met two Indians who said they had traveled up a large river from the Pacific Ocean; they bore English blankets from Captain Cook as proof. It was the final piece of evidence Pond needed.

  Pond sketched one last map. It showed the river of Matonabbee and Awgeenah as the direct connection between Slave Lake and Cook’s Inlet. A broad thoroughfare, no longer than the Pelican River, driving due west, skirting the northern edge of an exhausted Rocky Mountains, and emptying in a massive fork into the Pacific Ocean. He also drew a great waterfall, many miles wider and taller than Niagara, the largest in the world even. So the Chipewyan and Dogrib had reported. But if they had made the portage, Pond figured, there must be an established path that was not too arduous.

  This map, incorporating all of Pond’s synthesized knowledge of personal explorations and reported geography, was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine, London’s leading monthly periodical. It was a prestigious achievement appropriate for a bourgeois who had spent so much time in cartographic pursuits. On one end of the river, near Slave Lake, a note: “So far Pond.” On the other, at the Alaskan inlet: “So far Cook.” The two were so close. Pond’s Old Establishment was nearly there; as he had so often said, a three-day journey to the sea.

  * * *

  ————

  Alexander Mackenzie had just become an Athabasca man, the most revered of hommes du nord, and yet, in early December 1787, as soon as the rivers were shut tight, he traveled three hundred miles south, all the way to Île-à-la-Crosse, to see his cousin.

  He walked on snowshoes and slept outside on pine boughs, his feet as close to the fire as he could stand, all night long. In his years in the north, Alexander had seen trees with stumps cut clean fifteen or twenty feet above the portage trail. And the old northmen voyageurs told him that the Indians of this land were thirty or forty feet tall, and that is why the trees were felled at such an unusual height. But now he saw for himself that the snow in this country mounded so high that these towering stumps were at his knees. Still, his Chipewyan robes, stuffed with moose and caribou hair, kept a man warm all night. Alexander had seen a hunter dressed as such “lay himself down on the ice in the middle of a lake, and repose in comfort; though he will sometimes find a difficulty in the morning to disencumber himself from the snow drifted on him during the night.”

  Alexander had made the journey because he was concerned for Roderic. “Write me the first opportunity what you mean to do—whether you mean to remain in the country or not,” he told his cousin. Roderic was shaken by Ross’s death, wondering what kind of business he had taken up. “After the experience you must have had of the direful effect the late opposition has had upon those that engaged in it,” Alexander commiserated, “I do not know what advice to offer you.” For his own part, Alexander was having second thoughts as well. “Could I in four years of hard labour and anxiety pay the debt I owe our concern in consequence I should feel satisfied,” he said.

  But in truth, Alexander had a second reason to trudge all the way to Île-à-la-Crosse: Pond’s grandiosity. Alexander told Roderic and Patrick Small, the North West Company partner, of Pond’s “incomprehensively extravagant” plans, that he had seen a map “to lay before the Empress of Russia.” Small agreed that he was “quite surprised at the wild ideas Mr. Pond has of matters,” and Roderic said that Pond “thought himself a philosopher, and was odd in his manners.” And yet Alexander had to admit, privately, that the idea appealed to his own aspirations. Perhaps there was some merit in Pond’s plan. If he stayed with the North West Company, imagine if he were the one to take the voyage instead?

  On this, his “distant intentions,” as he called them, he swore Roderic to silence. “I beg you will not reveal them to any person, as it might be prejudicial to me, though I may never have it in my power to put them in execution.”

  In time, Pond grew suspicious of Alexander’s absence and wrote to Patrick Small, his trusted colleague, to ask what the young Scot was up to. Small wrote back but was cryptic in his reassurance, advising Pond that Mackenzie was doing nothing “contrary to the mutual interest of all concerned.” Everyone knew Pond was on the outs and Mackenzie the up-and-comer.

  Alexander stayed at Île-à-la-Crosse through mid-February. Both Alexander and Small “did all in their power to induce me to continue in the service,” Roderic wrote, but he was adamant about quitting. After Alexander returned to Athabasca, Barrieau, his devant, served as a trusted courier, shepherding letters back and forth between the Mackenzies. “I will not pretend to condemn or approve,” Alexander told Roderic, still bothered by his cousin’s insistence on leaving. If Roderic left the trade, what would he do instead, Alexander wondered, warning, “It is far more easy for a man to get into troubles than to get out of them.” Roderic wrote back saddened that Alexander was displeased, but said that clerking was akin to bondage. Alexander, who unlike Roderic had spent time among chained Africans in New York and Detroit, had little sympathy for this complaint. “As for your idea of Slavery I cannot approve of,” he wrote. “It shows that you never was acquainted with that abject condition.”

  The cousins’ disagreement remained affectionate, though; Alexander still referred to him as “Dear Rory,” and his last letter, before their reunion that summer, contained the postscript “I won’t forget your Books.”

  Mackenzie and Pond finished their season together in peace. No mysterious gunshots or unexplained scuffles. They even had a successful winter of trading, despite Mackenzie’s initial concerns; the Beaver Indians in particular repaid their debts from previous seasons. All told, their clerk, Cuthbert Grant, took four hundred pièces, eighteen tons of beaver fur, to Grand Portage.

  Pond left the Old Establishment on May 15, 1788, in his own canoe with eight paddlers. When he arrived at the rendezvous, his partners informed him that his services were no longer needed. Pond never again returned to the north.

  * * *

  ————

  Alexander was “quite out of conceit with the North West,” he told his cousin. “If I continue in my present opinion I shall certainly endeavor to get clear of it.” In fact, he had a plan to do so: find the Northwest Passage to China, earn his fortune, retire. And he couldn’t let Roderic quit, because Alexander needed his cousin’s help to pull it off.

  Alexander’s experience the previous fall—rivers frozen early and hard, snowbound canoes—convinced him that the main voyageur brigades had inadequate time to make it all the way to the rendezvous and back, not while carrying pièces on the portages. Instead, to cut a month off their transit, goods
bound for Athabasca would be staged at a new warehouse at Rainy Lake. On July 7, 1788, Alexander fretted impatiently, supervising the cross load and inventory of canvas-wrapped bundles. The next day he would set off in a light, unburdened canoe for Grand Portage, to quickly meet with the partners and discuss his expedition. “I wish you were here now,” he wrote to his cousin from the depot.

  Roderic’s spring journey from Île-à-la-Crosse was considerably shorter, and he had been waiting for Alexander at the rendezvous for some time. It was to be his last season, Roderic decided. He was done with the fur-trading business, he was sure of it. At their reunion at Grand Portage, Roderic found his cousin “extremely anxious and uncertain.” Alexander “insisted upon my accompanying him once more to the interior, which, notwithstanding my high regard for him, I declined,” Roderic said. But Alexander needed Roderic in Athabasca, while he made the exploration of Pond’s river the next summer. He could not undertake the quest without him.

  Alexander begged and revealed every bit of his “voyage of discovery” plans to Roderic “in confidence.” If Roderic “could not return and take charge of his department in his absence,” Alexander said, “he must abandon his intentions.” The guilt worked. “Considering his regret at my refusal,” Roderic “yielded to his wishes.”

  At the rendezvous, Alexander requested the top assignment: to take over Athabasca, the company’s most important and productive department, and, while Roderic ran the business in his absence, to find a path through the continent. His fellow bourgeois signed off. Alexander was on his way to find the Northwest Passage.

  * * *

  ————

  The expedition was a year away, but time was already running out to get it properly organized. Any European provisions he wished to carry, or men he wished to take on this voyage in 1789, he would have to put in place that summer of 1788. Alexander and Roderic moved quickly back to Athabasca, only fifty-two days of travel from Rainy Lake. But their haste was not without cost: just below Île-à-la-Crosse, a canoe was damaged and floundered. “I lost two men and eleven pieces of goods,” Alexander reported to his partners, with a detachment that reflected the tragedy’s commonness.